Why I Am Not a Libertarian
Ian
Lance
Taylor
http://www.airs.com/ian/
ian@airs.com
2003
Ian Lance Taylor
This document is licensed under a Creative
Commons License.
$Date: 2005/08/23 06:57:38 $
Thomas Paine
...this remissness will point out the necessity of establishing
some form of government to supply the defect of moral virtue.
Last changed on $Date: 2005/08/23 06:57:38 $.
I'm not a libertarian. Libertarian ideas are widespread on various
Internet discussion groups, although perhaps less so now than they
once were. Every so often I get caught in a discussion with somebody
pushing libertarian ideas. I wrote this essay to capture some of the
ways in which I think libertarian ideas are flawed. I'll start with a
brief description of libertarianism, and then list some of the
problems I see with it.
There are a number of critiques of libertarianism on the net, and it's
not my intent to repeat them. If you're interested, a good starting
place is Mike Huben's Critiques of
Libertarianism page.
What Is Libertarianism?
I'm not going to claim that I can fully describe libertarianism, but
here is my attempt at a brief sketch.
Libertarianism is a not a single idea. It is a constellation of
political and philosophical ideas centered around the notions that
personal freedom of action is paramount, and that government should be
minimized or eliminated. There are many different variations of
libertarianism, and not all libertarians agree on everything.
In general, libertarians stress the notion of individual liberty, and
argue that governments interfere with that liberty through taxation
and regulation. In general, libertarians argue that any action should
be permitted except the use of force, and they argue that government
actions such as taxation only work because they are backed by force.
In general, libertarians believe strongly in private property rights
and in rights of contract.
Coercion Is Not a Government Monopoly
A key reason that libertarians give for their dislike of government is
that government action constrains personal liberty. Taxation is a
typical example: if you don't pay your taxes, the government will send
men with guns to collect them. Libertarians consider this to be an
unacceptable form of coercion.
However, there are many types of coercion which come from the private
sector. For example, your employer may tell you that you must start
working mandatory unpaid overtime. This effectively lowers your
hourly wage. Naturally, you can quit, but there may not be any other
jobs in town, and you may not be able to afford to move, or to get
training for another type of job. (I didn't just make up this
example--there is a class action
lawsuit against Walmart about this).
For another example, your landlord may decide to raise the rent, or to
stop doing maintenance on the heating system, unless you agree to do
some personal chores. Naturally, you can move elsewhere, but there
may not be any other place available which is close enough to your
work, or all the other places may be more expensive.
These and other typical examples of coercion by the private sector
have a greater effect on people who happen to be poor. Poor people
generally have fewer options. Many people become poor through no
fault of their own, for reasons such as an unexpected death in the
family or being laid off. Such people are very vulnerable to many
types of private sector coercion.
In general, in daily life in the U.S., coercion by the private sector
is much more obvious day to day than coercion by the government. The
government normally leaves people alone other than garnishing their
paycheck. The private sector rarely leaves people alone, and limits
our choices every day--most obviously at our jobs. The fact that
private sector coercion is not backed by the threat of direct violence
does not mean that it is not coercion. Indirect violence, in the form
of loss of income, shelter, or food, is just as effective as direct
violence.
People sometimes cite a couple of reasons why private sector coercion
seems different from government coercion: you can refuse to take part,
or you can move somewhere else. However, those reasons are
misleading. Refusing to take part can mean losing your job and/or
becoming homeless. Moving elsewhere, besides being expensive in
itself, is only possible if there is a job elsewhere. It's true that
in principle, if everything works out, you have a choice. But in
practice, if something goes wrong, you do not.
Moreover, you actually have the same choices with a government. If
you refuse to pay your taxes, you may eventually be put in jail. But
at least you will be fed and sheltered. Or you can always move to a
different country. There are countries with very minimal governments,
such as Afghanistan or Somalia. While those choices may not seem
appealing, they are just as real as the choices you have to avoid
private sector coercion.
Another way in which private sector coercion differs from public
sector coercion is that the free market may create additional
opportunities in the private sector. However, large initial expenses
may make this unlikely. It costs a lot to build an apartment
building, and it takes a long time, so there may not be any choices
when you need them. Moreover, while a new government is unlikely to
be founded, it is entirely possible to use elections to create a new
government. So again the public and private sectors are not so very
different.
In fact, while there are obvious differences between the public and
private sectors, on the specific issue of constraining our personal
liberty I think that the government essentially acts like a large
corporation. It's interesting to note that while corporations have an
essential interest in constraining our behaviour--they want us to buy
their products--government does not. Government has an essential
interest in getting reelected; constraints on behaviour are secondary.
To my mind, the belief that government is particularly bad while
private enterprise is good is the oddest aspect of libertarianism.
Our actions in society are constrained in innumerable ways, not least
by simple custom. To pick out one thread and label it as bad seems to
me to be a gross simplification of the reality of our lives.
Common Property
Many libertarians stress the notion of private property. They argue
that only private ownership gives any incentive to preserve the
property. They claim that something which is owned by everyone is
valued by no one.
Current society, on the other hand, supports many things which are
held in common by groups of people or by the population at large, such
as public roads, public parks, community gardens, the air we breathe,
natural resources, scientific knowledge, and free software. It's true
that one must pay attention to the structure of common property in
order to ensure that it is maintained in an appropriate manner.
However, there is no obvious reason why private property is better
than other types of property.
Community gardens are a useful example of the difference between
private and common property. A community garden typically has lots
which are available on a first-come first-serve basis to members of
the community. The land is typically owned by the community--often
the town where the garden is located. If the community garden is
privately owned, then the existence of the garden depends upon the
whim of the owner. Placing the ownership with the town means that the
garden will exist unless and until a majority of voters in the town
choose to change it. (Another alternative is creating a trust to own
the garden, but how do you decide who controls the trust? If you make
every resident of the town a member, you have simply recreated a
government function.)
The existence of common property typically relies on restrictions
placed on other people. For example, the existence of public parks
implies that people are not permitted to build houses on that land.
Of course, this is also true of private property. Property is
meaningless unless somebody is prepared to enforce restrictions on
that property. These restrictions must ultimately rely on an appeal
to force.
When people think of common property, they often think of the tragedy
of the commons. This is the problem which libertarians are trying to
solve by requiring private ownership. However, as can be seen by the
examples above, there are many cases of common property which do not
suffer from any tragedy.
On the other hand, there are real cases of a tragedy of the commons
which are difficult to solve using only the notion of private
property. Air pollution, for example, is a case in which for a single
corporation the benefits of creating pollution are much greater than
the costs. Simply assigning every person a property interest in the
air is unlikely to help--if my air is polluted by a factor 100 miles
away, how will I know who to blame? If I do know who to blame, how
much should I charge them? If I spend a great deal of effort getting
them to clean up their act, that also benefits my neighbor, who didn't
have to do anything--the free rider problem.
For that matter, discussing these ideas avoids the notion that owning
the air is a very strange notion. Clearly I don't own particular
molecules. Do I own a particular space? Does it travel with me as I
travel about town? Does cigarette smoke, or car exhaust, violate my
property rights?
An interesting modern approach to air pollution is to invent a new
type of property, the right to pollute a certain amount, and assign
that property to corporations. Corporations are free to exchange
their pollution rights. This permits corporations to make cost
benefit decisions as to whether to buy pollution rights or decrease
pollution. Over time, the pollution rights are decreased; in
principle, this leads to an overall decrease in pollution. This is an
example of bundling common property into private property. Note that
it implies that somebody owns the common property, and is able to
enforce restrictions on the resulting private property. In current
society, the owner is the government on behalf of the people at large.
I don't know how this approach could be implemented in a libertarian
society without an unacceptable threat of force.
For a final example of the tragedy of the commons, consider fish in
the ocean. Fish are an example of a natural resource which are easily
over-exploited. When the number of fish are reduced below some level,
it is no longer possible for fishermen (and -women) to make a living.
Fishermen as a group are better off if they cooperate to not
over-exploit the fish in the area. However, for a fisherman who
doesn't mind switching to a different job, it is rational to not
cooperate, but to instead catch as much fish as possible before
switching. Thus, any cooperation must be enforced by a threat of
force. The libertarian approach would presumably be to assign private
ownership of the fishery to some person. But would that person own
the ocean, or the fish? How can that ownership be split up among
different people? How do we get there from here?
To sum up, in practice today there are many different types of
property ownership. Many libertarians stress only a single type:
private ownership by an individual or corporation. This is a
simplification of how things work today, and it's not clear why it is
a beneficial one.
Free Markets and Monopolies
Viewed in market terms, the government is a monopoly provider of
certain services. Many libertarians want to break up that monopoly,
and permit private firms to compete for services such as road building
and maintenance, police protection, etc. The argument is that the
free market encourages competition, and leads to greater efficiency.
However, it's important to remember that in many areas the free market
leads not to competition, but to monopoly. In areas which require
large initial investment, but which have economies of scale once you
get big, once one company gets established, it's very hard for another
company to enter the market. That company will tend to dominate the
market until a new cycle of technology changes the basic economics of
the business. The reason we don't see more monopolies in today's
markets is, of course, that the government breaks them up. In the
U.S., before the anti-trust acts were passed starting in 1890, there
were plenty of monopolies.
Not surprisingly, many of the services which the government provides
today lend themselves to becoming monopolies in a market scheme. So
in practice we have a choice of monopoly providers. The advantage of
the government is that it is inherently accountable via elections. A
private monopoly provider has very little accountability.
Too Many Decisions
In an extreme libertarian society we would each have to choose our
police protection provider, our water and sewage service, our road
vendor, our fire protection service, our home inspection service, etc.
We would have to make these decisions based on the information they
provided, but since there would be no Truth in Advertising Act (who
would enforce it?) we would also have to study reports from different
consumer organizations. We would have to decide what information was
most trust-worthy and make our choices on that basis. We would have
to review those choices regularly. We would have to learn a great
deal about many different things.
Frankly, to me, it all sounds too complicated. One of the reasons to
elect a government is to find smart people to look into different
issues and make the right decision. Current U.S. government certainly
has problems with corruption and undue corporate influence, but lets
not throw the baby out with the bathwater. The principle of
collectively hiring people to make good decisions, while avoiding the
free rider problem, sounds good to me.
Some Other Items
I'll list off a few other things which bother me about libertarianism,
without discussing them in detail.
The libertarian position on the environment seems to be to give it to
private owners, who will preserve it. But businesses often make
decisions based on short term profit rather than long term investment.
For an example of how a corporation can destroy the environment that
it owns, look at Maxxam/Pacific
Lumber.
Sometimes people get in serious trouble through no fault of their own.
Current government provides a limited social safety net. History
tells us how bad things could be before that safety net existed--try
reading some Dickens. Libertarians want to remove the safety net, and
hope that private charity will make up for it. To me this is either a
harsh lack of compassion or blind optimism.
Libertarian society relies on contract enforcement. But who enforces
contracts? Presumably some private police provider. But what if the
person who breaks the contract hires the biggest police provider
around? What prevents them from simply ignoring complaints?
Libertarians sometimes say that current society assumes that everybody
behaves badly. I think libertarian society assumes that everybody
behaves well. Neither assumption is correct; the question is which
one leads to a better overall result?
Libertarians stress personal property rights, but what makes property
so special? Why isn't the right to life--i.e., food and shelter--more
important than the right to property? Our society should presumably
be organized around the rights which we think are most fundamental.
Intellectual property is an interesting case as it is entirely a
creation of the government. It's not obvious how a libertarian
society can provide any form of intellectual property which is not
based on contract rights--i.e., non-disclosure agreements. Current
society has various different types of intellectual property, such as
trade secrets, patents, and copyrights, which are not based on
contract rights. In libertarian society, do we give those up?
A good government guarantees minority rights. Consider a libertarian
society in the U.S. deep south of the early to mid 20th century.
Black people not only would have had even fewer rights than they did
in the U.S., they would have had no non-violent way to gain more
rights.
Conclusion
In the end, the government is not an external force imposed upon us.
We choose the people who compose the government. They are us. There
are certainly many difficulties with government. But we can see
societies with no government. We call them failed states, and we
don't want to live there.
The ideal libertarian society is a utopia, one created by ignoring the
complexities of real life. It will almost certainly never exist. I
don't think it's even desirable. I wouldn't want to live there. I
wouldn't even want to visit.
Thanks
This essay incorporates suggestions from Elisabeth Ross.